1. Introduction
Vehicles on Blood Donation Services; This essay entails a research-based project that deals with the fact that delivery services are common requirements in the medical sector. They are a necessity for patient transfers from one hospital to another, for acquiring surgeries and medications, and for other hospital supplies. In particular, several organizations have delivery services that include supplying hospitals with blood purchased from donors. These are coupled with the NHS’s dedicated emergency delivery services which operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Of a national remit, such four blood services are responsible for the provision of blood to all hospitals in one of four areas, or “lots”. The Shropshire and Staffordshire blood service provides for the whole of the Midlands and operates out of a Manufacturing Centre and five hospital collection teams based in local strategic health authorities.
In 2020, a review of recent contributions to this field of operations management suggested three remaining research directions. This proposal represents the beginnings of a piece of work designed to attend to the first of these. In particular, we are interested in the deployment of alternative sorts of vehicles in the last portion of the blood supply chain. In 2019, two sorts of vehicles were used to perform these duties. These are (1) blood bikes and (2) charity-funded vans. The implications of using these vehicles to deliver blood to and from hospitals are the subject of this short essay. We will begin with an explanation of the services offered by the SSCB doningos.
2. Overview of Blood Donation Services
Blood donation services are very important in people’s daily lives. As early as the 17th century, the Frenchman Richet already discovered that the consumption of pig blood can cure human diseases. In recent years, some scientific researchers have found that donating blood can remove excess iron from the human body, reduce the blood viscosity of the donors, and reduce the probability of hypertension. Blood donation is also an approvable and necessary procedure before blood transfusion, surgery, or chemotherapy. Giving blood is done in a hospital, blood centre, or mobile blood donor unit. The blood donation service is performed to maintain the availability, quality, and safety of blood stocks, as well as to gain community trust in various societies. Additionally, the blood donation service makes the surrounding community beneficial, especially in terms of health. Due to the life-threat of blood or its products, highly specific and complex donation procedures such as donor assessment, collection, processing, and testing as well as counseling of the donor need to be performed to lose the main obstacles to address the target. Therefore, to support the cost effectiveness of running this service, research is needed to develop an optimal vehicle that meets the needs of the community.
In order to improve services in the community, a vehicle is used to collect the blood. Mobility units are the important component to provide blood collection services in remote and difficult to reach areas. The “non vehicle Response” (NVR) policy must always be done to compare with a strategy that uses a vehicle that is fit for the purpose. The model test made in this study demonstrates how the type of vehicle for a donor unit (i.e., two-wheeled donor horses and four-wheeled donor vehicles) affects the percentage of the net benefit of doing routine mobile donations in the required time in different locations in densely populated areas, such as Jakarta City in Indonesia. The results show that using four-wheeled vehicles is better than using a two-wheeled vehicle.
3. Types of Vehicles Used in Blood Donation Services
There are three main types of vehicles that can be used in the transport and collection of blood donation materials. The most prevalent design, and also the focus of our analysis of differential potential, is mobile blood donation trucks, in this case labeled as Bloodmobiles.
The third type of vehicle, considered as intermediate between the Bloodmobile and the ambulance, relates to personal cars/vehicles. These are commonly people carriers within which private passengers unconnected with the Blood Bank can donate. The profile of such walk-in, ad hoc donors does not align with either the expectations of a Bloodmobile session, to plan old and new donors, not seriously frequented in the recent past, or that a return appointment donor (ideally in the home, work, and school campaign) required for a reuse blood donation.
3.1. Mobile Blood Donation Vehicles
Mobile blood donation vehicles, which serve the purpose of transporting medical staff, medical equipment, and blood donors, have a significant value to the logistics of blood donation collection services. As far as it is known, a specific theoretical description of the problems related to scheduling mobile blood donation vehicle services in the area of the operation research has not been developed. Logistics and workflow researched for organizing blood donation were focused on the practical aspects of blood center operation. The work on a mathematical model of the human body’s reactions during treatment advises scheduling breaks into a workday. As the blood service provider faces two materials with a limited shelf-life, methods which address operations where vehicles are designed to extract as much of the first material from a set of visiting sites (blood donations) before heading to storage and utilizing the other material to minimize losses would be of some value.
Terblanche and Rochat summarized the advantages and disadvantages of mobile blood donation vehicles. Advantages include the ability to cut down travel time for those people who lived too far from a donation site and to bring the blood collection site to the donor, which the researchers pointed out was especially appealing to companies and businesses who utilized donor appointments as a means to prevent a whole department from being out for extended periods of time. Innovations associated with the vehicle design and operations were researched. A double-decker vehicle with automated beds, which progressed through the vehicle to allow donors to lie down for their donations, was attached to the National Institute of Blood Services blood donation drives in the North West province of South Africa. The advantages and disadvantages of mobile blood donation vehicles were focused.
3.2. Ambulances
While it is not a legal requirement to use an ambulance on every journey that involves a patient who has received medical treatment, many services do. When patients receive a transfusion of blood or blood products, it is advisable that they are transported as minimally as possible. Using an ambulance as the method of transport can reduce any additional suffering for the patient and remove any potential difficulties in how further health issues might be managed during the transfer. This is more likely to be a consideration for an emergency transfer with a patient who is more unwell. In the standard operation of blood donation services, the use of ambulance services is uncommon. There may be a perception by some services that using an ambulance service may be cost-inefficient. This might be a false economy that neglects the possible improvement of the services.
The use of ambulances does enable a health check to be done on our behalf on the day of a donation. Ambulances might also transport the strong-smelling vials, which can be immediately couriered to the laboratory. Some of the benefits and limitations of this solution are presented, along with possible solutions when ambulances are involved. It should be made clear during negotiations that the blood service is not responsible for the patient once they are in the hands of the ambulance service. Difficulties associated with patient discharge are entirely an EMS problem. A drawback of this solution is that it is not cost-effective.
3.3. Personal Vehicles
The use of personal vehicles as a mode of transportation in blood services refers to the method of having volunteers use their own vehicles to transport phlebotomy equipment or blood services staff. Personal vehicle use and its feasibility are location-specific, heavily relying on factors such as geographical and infrastructural differences, access to public transit, and societal differences. According to Sazama, two-volunteer vehicle operators “reduce the cost of transportation service by potentially using efficiency savings earned by using spare capacity on the vehicle (in this case, unused seating) for transporting essential services or goods (in this case, blood services staff). Using volunteer drivers also permits the blood service to extend driving coverage far beyond that available using dedicated transport staff (perhaps fewer than 20 examiners nationwide) and to meet a variety of shifts,” thereby increasing the number of hours that a driving service can be offered. The spare capacity refers to the idea that most personal vehicles have room for extra passengers, though this is not always the case.
The nature of personal vehicle use for blood services is that it is often not exclusive to providing a blood service. Volunteer driving programs will often have multiple pick-ups and can be used in the transportation and enabling of access to a variety of health and non-health services, social events, or engagements. The BRDG is an intervention specific to the blood service. Participants using the intervention are not providing transport just in general, they are helping the Red Cross Blood Service collect the blood that they require. They can only transport amongst these functions in one organization: driving to make a blood donation and driving to undertake blood service phlebotomy work as part of the same logistical transport service distributed across a national to local level.
4. Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Vehicle Types
The advantages of the types of vehicles already discharge the car convenience after purchase are compared, and the size of the operation range is large, and there is no fear of vehicle size and weight. However, because the purchase cost per vehicle is large and depends on transport needs, blood donation does not exist in a small amount of blood donation, and therefore the operation made a small cost becomes necessary. The automobile, which can transport a large amount of blood and product in addition to the blood, is superior to automobile as a vehicle. Capacity is in the car line, given the operation range and means of transportation, transportation can be carried out. In recent years, emissions have been regulated, and as a means of regulations due to their impact on the environment, they are taking measures to be in operation.
Moving vehicles have more effects and negative factors than those of other vehicles. There is a limit to the number of all cars and large automobiles. Therefore, it costs to deliver vehicles, and advantages and disadvantages of some cars are often compared and evaluated according to available areas. The van is the smallest convenience and has the fewest disadvantages of the three types of cars. There is a short time use, and blood was used for transportation mainly from a blood donation room. Therefore, cars are placed in a region where the number of blood donations is small. Blood delivery systems, logistics and plans have been developed so that cars can be used in small areas. Since cars are not limited to limiting blood groups and serum donations to their own area, the delivery speed of small cars is Ireland’s region and serves as hours of delivery. Since car operations belong to the blood center, they are centralized and their blood centers come from the planned collection of the region. The car may be shared with a small car. However, there are personnel who can operate cars, and many cars have been used with a lot of recovery and transport control.
5. Case Studies and Examples
Blood donation vehicle selection plays a crucial role in managing blood donation activities. The previous two sections illustrated how the decision of vehicle selection impacts the cost, physical and psychological consequences on the donor, benefits for the blood centre, and the blood collection process. These could be further influenced by many factors, such as the inventory position and age-based donor recruitment that were discussed in the previous section.
In this final section, several cases are drawn upon to demonstrate the significance of the blood vehicle decision.
Two blood centres each operate different types of blood donation vehicles. Blood Centre A uses all mobile facilities, such as lorry units, to collect blood. Blood Centre B operates a large static facility in a city centre and mobile lorries. These two centres are located in busy urban areas.
In Blood Centre B, considerable amounts of lorry collections are dispersed among the lorry, fixed wing, and helicopter facilities. This has several ramifications. One implication is that the many walk-in donors and some appointment donors are given slots to donate on a mobile lorry. This benefits the donor who does not have the inconvenience of travelling to a donation session, packing on the day, and having to return to their automobile and negotiating heavy traffic and inadequate parking facilities.
Overall, the two centres, though they operate in quite different circumstances, both meet the Enlightenment principles of allocating minimum pain to the donor, maximizing the use of resources for maximum benefit through cooperation, and benefiting the communities amongst whom they operate. Blood vehicles such as buses, hearing vans, and boats have been converted for use as mobile or static blood facilities. Many of these are mainly static facilities with the ability to operate as mobile as a bonus.
